(via The human heart stripped of fat and muscle, with…)
UPDATE, via sexartandpolitics! this is not a human heart, it is a porcine heart:
“This is the vasculature of an actual heart (porcine heart, identical to human heart). The blood is replaced by a plastic substance which fills all of the veins, capillaries, etc, then the heart is put into a solution that dissolves all the tissue, leaving this incredible detail of a heart.” (glockoma on flickr)
The [current group of people who are] unemployed aren’t merely a narrower slice of the American electorate than in previous downturns. They also are concentrated in highly populous states that are severely underrepresented in the Senate.
Overall, this bolsters Rampell’s thesis that there are a variety of historical and institutional factors conspiring to make the modern unemployed invisible. Yet it also casts doubt upon her suggestion that the unemployed could attract the attention of politicians by simply turning out to vote. After all, no matter how much mobilizing took place among the 2.3 million people who made up the 12.4 percent of California’s workforce that was unemployed at the time of the 2010 elections, they still would’ve only had the opportunity to vote for as many senators — one — as did the 96.1 percent of North Dakota’s labor force (roughly 356,000 people) that was happily employed.
Cash-strapped Californians would rather ease “third-strike” penalties for some criminals and accept felons as neighbors than dig deeper into their pockets to relieve prison overcrowding, a new poll shows.
In the wake of a court order that the state move more than 33,000 inmates out of its packed prisons, an overwhelming number of voters oppose higher taxes — as well as cuts in key state services — to pay for more lockup space.
The survey, by The Times and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, shows a clear shift in attitude by residents forced to confront the cost of tough sentencing laws passed in recent decades.
Sea otter stalks young boy at aquarium
Watch as a bored aquarium otter catches the attention of a young boy and starts playing.
| — | Tom Stoppard (via kari-shma) |
Right now in academic publishing, what you have is basically a lot of donor- and government-financed nonprofit organizations taking outputs with near-zero distribution costs (electronic journal archives) and selling them to each other. For any one institution, this kind of makes sense. A publisher doesn’t want to give up his fees, which are valuable in meeting the costs of producing scholarship. But on net, it’s a mix of pointless and pernicious. Sale of access to journals helps finance scholarship, but it also raises the cost of scholarship. If everything was distributed for free, the whole exact same enterprise could be undertaken with no net financial loss. But there would be huge potential gains. A precocious 17 year-old could have free access to scholarship. So could a researcher living and working in a poor country. Or even an earnest political reporter who’s working on an issue and curious about what political science has to say about it. When I, personally, come across an article I’d like to read but can’t get free access to, my standard practice is to tweet about it and then someone affiliated with a university sends it to me. That’s good for me and, I think, good for the world. But there’s no reason curious people should need to amass thousands of twitter followers before they’re able to gain access to information that’s been produced by non-profit institutions that are supposed to be serving the public interest.
The glasswing butterfly with transparent wings has a Spanish name, “espejitos,” which means “little mirrors.” If it wasn’t for the opaque outline around the wings, the average observer might not see one perched on a leaf or flower.
Check out some more amazing transparent animals.
The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs released its annual report on hate violence motivated by sexual orientation, gender identity and expression and HIV status last week. The report documents 27 anti-LGBT murders in 2010, which is the second highest annual total recorded since 1996. A whopping 70 percent of these 27 victims were people of color; 44 percent of them were transgender women.
The study also found that transgender people and people of color are each twice as likely to experience violence or discrimination as non-transgender white people. Transgender people of color are also almost 2.5 times as likely to experience discrimination as their white peers.
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